Cities Will Collapse Even Sooner Than We Fear

We have written several times about how major population groupings (ie cities) will collapse ‘shortly’ after the essential elements of life cease to smoothly flow in to them as needed. When there’s no water, no sewage, no food, no gas and no electricity, things will unavoidably get very nasty.

In an earlier post we suggested that cities will decay into violent anarchistic morasses within a week or two. In that article we were deliberately trying to look at a ‘best case scenario’ (don’t laugh – the collapse of cities taking a week or two is, alas, a best case scenario!). Our projection was based on the ‘best case’ hope that people would remain passive for a few days and it would only be when people realized no help was coming and they were starting to starve that things would turn truly nasty.

One of our readers, ‘Lt. Dan’, wrote in to share his perspective of what might go down, and alas, it is not nearly as sunny and optimistic as our earlier best case hope. His point is that violence will break outimmediately. There will not be days of ambiguity before things start to fail.

He says that in known ‘hot spots’ in larger cities, the violence will start at once, and as soon as the violent offenders realize that the police response is inadequate (or totally missing) it will skyrocket in scope and extent.

This is a key issue for us, because it impacts on our decision about when to ‘Get Out Of Dodge’ (GOOD) and hightail it to our remote retreat. How much time do we have to decide what to do between when a massive problem occurs and when the city becomes lawless?